Oz and Grumpity Linden Interview @ SLS15B

[Nalates Urriah]

This is a WAY interesting interview of two of Second Life's movers and shakers...

The outline with time marks for subjects is here: http://blog.nalates.net/2018/06/21/oz-and-grumpity-linden-talk/

Edited June 22, 2018 by Nalates Urriah
Added link to outline

[Phil Deakins]

Thank you for the link. I listened to most of it. It confirmed a suspicion that I've had, and posted a number of times, about mesh. It is that LL didn't bring mesh in for avatars. They brought it in for objects, and they hadn't intended or expected it to be used for avatars.

That fact does highlight a way in which LL works. They saw what users were doing with mesh, and they followed it. They didn't just leave the users to it, because it hadn't been their intention. They actually sat down and worked it into SL. From what was said in that interview, it sounds like that's not uncommon.

[animats]

That's a good talk. Worth a listen if you're developing anything in SL.

Oz and Grumpy sound quite upbeat and plan a steadily improving future for SL. Most of the plans focus on making things look better. The move to the cloud is just so LL can get out of running a data center. There might be some performance improvement from newer hardware, but they're not promising anything.

That's in contrast to yesterday's talk by the marketing Linden who does the Destinations guide.  His goal is merely to get the rate of decline in users to level off, and maybe, just maybe, increase some day. That's unusual. Normally, company marketing people are optimistic. He probably gets that from Ebbe Altberg, who said much the same thing in his talk a few weeks ago. Marketing management at LL seems to have rather low goals.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 6/22/2018 at 5:03 AM, Phil Deakins said:

Thank you for the link. I listened to most of it. It confirmed a suspicion that I've had, and posted a number of times, about mesh. It is that LL didn't bring mesh in for avatars. They brought it in for objects, and they hadn't intended or expected it to be used for avatars.

That fact does highlight a way in which LL works. They saw what users were doing with mesh, and they followed it. They didn't just leave the users to it, because it hadn't been their intention. They actually sat down and worked it into SL. From what was said in that interview, it sounds like that's not uncommon.

That is accurate. At the time mesh was being added users tried to convince the Lindens it would be used for clothing and avatars more than 'things'... buildings, cars, etc. 

Between then and now the Linden mindset has shifted. It gets complicated understanding how the Lindens think. To avoid Borking or Trumpizing (the new Bork) the Lindens one has to understand what they think and do is constrained by company policy. Ebbe has changed that in a positive way. Development now is different than in the mesh dev days. Bento, Animesh, EEP, BoM... are projects being bent toward a path users want.

What is consistent is the engineers not having the same perception of how SL is used as users do. Oz's mention of the server update is a clear example of that. However, users don't really see the technical complexities of the SL system in the way Lindens do. So, we consistently get conflicts between the two groups.

46 minutes ago, animats said:

That's in contrast to yesterday's talk by the marketing Linden who does the Destinations guide.  His goal is merely to get the rate of decline in users to level off, and maybe, just maybe, increase some day. That's unusual. Normally, company marketing people are optimistic. He probably gets that from Ebbe Altberg, who said much the same thing in his talk a few weeks ago. Marketing management at LL seems to have rather low goals.

Low or realistic? I can't decide. I do think SL marketing has tried lots of different things. They may be a bit jaded by now.

The latest idea is the impetus behind Place Pages. They are to help users contribute to the marketing of SL. Let those that love and are enthusiastic about an aspect of SL market it. Presumably they can do a better job than Lindens. Whatever, the experiment is on.

A major flaw in Place Pages is their non-existence in the search engine results. To see how bad it is, find a place page from within SL and then try targeted, specific search in the search engines to find the page. I have yet to succeed.

A better effort is in the user gateways. Gateways are where a user or group of users builds a website using Linden API's. They can control their search engine optimization and get placement in search engines. It is a complex mix of web and SL tech to get a gateway up. It requires coordination and approval from the Lab. Place Pages are a simplified gateway approach.

[animats]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

A major flaw in Place Pages is their non-existence in the search engine results. To see how bad it is, find a place page from within SL and then try targeted, specific search in the search engines to find the page. I have yet to succeed.

The Destinations sales Linden said that a big point of the Destinations Guide was that it produced visibility in Google. If that's not working, report it, because that's a Linden marketing goal.

[Parhelion Palou]

6 minutes ago, animats said:

The Destinations sales Linden said that a big point of the Destinations Guide was that it produced visibility in Google. If that's not working, report it, because that's a Linden marketing goal.

Place Pages isn't part of the Destination Guide. It's something LL has hidden well but would like people who have regions or parcels to use.